Revision as of 17:09, 12 May 2009

Contents

Alice Zhang's Final Project: Natural and Artifical Cross Synthesizers

Overview of the GUI

The concept

I decided to use the concept of cross-synthesis to play around with soundscapes. Briefly, cross-synthesis involves superimposing the flattened spectrum of one sound (in this case your voice) on the spectral envelope of another. In short, this will make your voice sound a particular way -- whether it be "talking water", a robot, or chimes. In particular, I learned how to use Max/MSP to create a GUI interface that allows one to create a natural or artificial soundscape with which they can blend in their voice via cross-synthesis.

How do I use it?

In Step 1, you record your voice into whatever sound sample you want to sound like -- so if you want to record a sample and mix it into "wind" then you would press the green button next to wind, speak into the microphone, and press it again to stop recording. The boxes above Step 2 toggles the playing of the sound sample. Step 3 allows you to mix in your recorded voice sample into the natural soundscape. The slider indicates the rate at which you'd like to play the natural sound sample. In contrast to the natural sound sample, we have an artificial cross synthsizer. This allows one to also input a sample of their own voice, except alter it using man-made sound samples, allowing one to alter the rate and pitch of the sample that their voice is mixed into. Lastly, one can record their own voice again and cross synthesize their voice against itself. The quality and coolness of how this turns out depends on what you record -- for example recording a hush would make your voice sound creepy, but if you just speak into it normally, not much will happen.